President Trump & the USA

Jattdogg · 4 August 2018

Starting to think trump will win a second term easily. Base love him, job numbers are up and the dems cant seem to get their shiet together.

The minority and womens vote is crucial for the dems but not sure it will be enough.

4 August 2018

12 minutes ago, Jattdogg said:

Starting to think trump will win a second term easily. Base love him, job numbers are up and the dems cant seem to get their shiet together.

The minority and womens vote is crucial for the dems but not sure it will be enough.

Still going to be hard, he'll face a campaign against him from the media even worse than last time but I think the influence of that is waining.

The Dems are tragic though, we have nothing to offer but please come and vote for us if you aren't white or have a vagina as he's nasty. What a mess for the political party of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman.

Who would thought cutting taxes stimulates an economy? So obvious, basic economics and something people have almost forgotten.

Edited 4 August 2018 by MattP

leicsmac · 4 August 2018

12 minutes ago, Jattdogg said:

Starting to think trump will win a second term easily. Base love him, job numbers are up and the dems cant seem to get their shiet together.

The minority and womens vote is crucial for the dems but not sure it will be enough.

Just now, MattP said:

Still going to hard, he'll face a campaign against it from the media even worse than last time but I think the influence of that is waining.

The Dems are tragic though, we have nothing to offer but please come and vote for us if you aren't white or have a vagina as he's nasty. What a mess for the political party of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman.

Who would thought cutting taxes stimulates am economy? So obvious, basic economics and something people have almost forgotten.

Still a long way to go, think the bookies offering even money right now is about right.

It all comes down to the Dem candidate - they have to offer something more than "but I'm not Trump", that alone isn't going to cut it. Also steer away from the economy - yes, identity politics seem like a busted flush now but there's been a lot of Trumps policies that have focused on exactly that and it is where he is weak and where you could get the turnout boosted - and turnout will be critical, it lost Hillary the last election.

Jattdogg · 4 August 2018

1 minute ago, leicsmac said:

Still a long way to go, think the bookies offering even money right now is about right.

It all comes down to the Dem candidate - they have to offer something more than "but I'm not Trump", that alone isn't going to cut it. Also steer away from the economy - yes, identity politics seem like a busted flush now but there's been a lot of Trumps policies that have focused on exactly that and it is where he is weak and where you could get the turnout boosted - and turnout will be critical, it lost Hillary the last election.

Well worst case is 6 more years of the orange tit.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1KP06O

Definitely has no problem attacking black professional athletes. For a guy who calls cnn fake news he seems to love watching them...or i thought he said he didnt watch them?

Detroit Blues · 4 August 2018

2 hours ago, Jattdogg said:

Starting to think trump will win a second term easily. Base love him, job numbers are up and the dems cant seem to get their shiet together.

The minority and womens vote is crucial for the dems but not sure it will be enough.

Dems win when voter turnout is high. The overwhelming unpopularity of trump would bring out the vote.

You bring up an interesting point though about possible candidate for 2020. The two most popular democrats are advanced in age. Bernie Sanders is 76 and Joe Biden is 75. By 2020 they'll be ancient. I have no idea if the party has a good candidate to run with. Also, is it out of the question that Trump won't get challenged by members of his own party in the primary?

Edited 4 August 2018 by Detroit Blues

Jattdogg · 4 August 2018

29 minutes ago, Detroit Blues said:

Dems win when voter turnout is high. The overwhelming unpopularity of trump would bring out the vote.

You bring up an interesting point though about possible candidate for 2020. The two most popular democrats are advanced in age. Bernie Sanders is 76 and Joe Biden is 75. By 2020 they'll be ancient. I have no idea if the party has a good candidate to run with. Also, is it out of the question that Trump won't get challenged by members of his own party in the primary?

His own party would lose against him.

Bernie and joe are too old if you ask me. Im not sure who could be bold enough to handle trump. If Bernie was younger i could see him winning. But hey never say never right as age is just a number.

Dont see america going for another black candidate in cory booker. I like him but not sure he is presidential (i mean compared to trump he is lol) enough to get the votes. Given how polarizing trump has been not sure a minority would be a great candidate right now. It definitely may not bring over the flippers..

Time will tell but if you ask me the dems need to get their candidate out ASAP and start getting a unified message out that appeals to dems and repubs that are fed up with trumps antics etc.

Merging Cultures · 6 August 2018

On 04/08/2018 at 16:43, Jattdogg said:

His own party would lose against him.

Bernie and joe are too old if you ask me. Im not sure who could be bold enough to handle trump. If Bernie was younger i could see him winning. But hey never say never right as age is just a number.

Dont see america going for another black candidate in cory booker. I like him but not sure he is presidential (i mean compared to trump he is lol) enough to get the votes. Given how polarizing trump has been not sure a minority would be a great candidate right now. It definitely may not bring over the flippers..

Time will tell but if you ask me the dems need to get their candidate out ASAP and start getting a unified message out that appeals to dems and repubs that are fed up with trumps antics etc.

I agree re another black candidate. Eric Holder is thinking of going for it. I think he'd be a great President, but I don't think it's the right time.

I also agree Dems need to get themselves sorted as quickly as possible.

HarryDee8 · 6 August 2018

Business wise hes very very good! I just wish he could control his mouth a little. Oh and someone take his twitter away!

Webbo · 6 August 2018

36 minutes ago, HarryDee8 said:

Business wise hes very very good! I just wish he could control his mouth a little. Oh and someone take his twitter away!

It's boom and bust economics, it won't last.

leicsmac · 6 August 2018

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45079377

Awful lot of flip-flopping on what actually happened here....

Strokes · 6 August 2018

18 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45079377

Awful lot of flip-flopping on what actually happened here....

If you’re going to lie, you need to remember what has already been said right?

leicsmac · 6 August 2018

9 minutes ago, Strokes said:

If you’re going to lie, you need to remember what has already been said right?

It does help, yeah.

Seems like The Don has trouble with that though.

leicsmac · 7 August 2018

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-science-save-politics/

Interesting stuff from fivethirtyeight.

Personally, I'd love for science to remain politically impartial and those who research be allowed to do their jobs no matter who is in charge at any one time...but more recently that seems to be becoming less and less of an option, especially in some crucial areas like climate science.

leicsmac · 8 August 2018

A few special elections took place yesterday, most notably in Ohio where it looks like the Repub candidate Balderson (with backing from Trump) seems to have managed a narrow victory against the Dem candidate O'Connor. Considering when Trump was elected the Repubs had a 13-point lead in that seat and that's now been reduced to merely 1 or 2, it could make for an interesting race when it's rerun in November, along with most of the House and Senate.

A little infographic from fivethirtyeight regarding special election outcomes since Trump was elected. The Repubs have held onto most of the seats they've had to contest, but a look indicates that Trumps confidence about November might, just might, be misplaced:

Year	Date	Seat	Partisan Lean	Vote Margin	Dem. Swing
2017	April 4	California 34th*	D+69	D+87	+18
	April 11	Kansas 4th	R+29	R+6	+23
	May 25	Montana at large	R+21	R+6	+16
	June 20	Georgia 6th	R+9	R+4	+6
	June 20	South Carolina 5th	R+19	R+3	+16
	Nov. 7	Utah 3rd	R+35	R+32	+3
	Dec. 12	Alabama Senate	R+29	D+2	+31
2018	March 13	Pennsylvania 18th	R+21	D+0.3	+22
	April 24	Arizona 8th	R+25	R+5	+20
	June 30	Texas 27th*	R+26	R+21	+5
	Aug. 7	Ohio 12th†	R+14	R+1	+13

leicsmac · 8 August 2018

Oh, and Alex Jones has been booted off practically every mainstream platform known to man (with the exception of Twitter).

Turns out getting your followers to harass the parents of kids who have been shot dead has consequences, who knew?

Buce · 10 August 2018

Omarosa says Trump is a racist who uses N-word – and claims there's tape to prove it

Former Apprentice contestant and ex-White House adviser writes in new memoir that she witnessed ‘truly appalling things’

Donald Trump is a “racist” who has used the “N-word” repeatedly, Omarosa Manigault Newman, once the most prominent African American in the White House, claims in a searing memoir.

The future US president was caught on mic uttering the taboo racial slur “multiple times” during the making of his reality TV show The Apprentice and there is a tape to prove it, according to Manigault Newman, citing three unnamed sources.

Trump has been haunted from around the time of his election in 2016 by allegations that outtakes from the reality TV show exist in which he is heard saying the N-word and using other offensive language.

In her book, Unhinged, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian ahead of its publication next week, the former Apprentice participant insists that the reports are true, although she does not say she heard him use the word herself.

She also claims that she personally witnessed Trump use racial epithets about the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway, who is half Filipino. “Would you look at this George Conway article?” she quotes the president as saying. “F**ing FLIP! Disloyal! ****ing Goo-goo.”

Both flip and goo-goo are terms of racial abuse for Filipinos.

Critics have previously questioned Manigault Newman’s credibility and are likely to accuse her of seeking revenge against the administration after her abrupt dismissal last December.

At the time, she writes, she felt a “growing realization that Donald Trump was indeed a racist, a bigot and a misogynist. My certainty about the N-word tape and his frequent uses of that word were the top of a high mountain of truly appalling things I’d experienced with him, during the last two years in particular.”

Recalling her sudden and unceremonious departure, she writes: “It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist. Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”

Trump hosted NBC’s The Apprentice from 2004-2015 before running for the presidency and still likes to laud his high ratings.

His insurgent election campaign was rocked in October 2016 by the release of an Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”. The media firestorm prompted Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, to tweet that there were “far worse” tapes of Trump behind the scenes of the show.

Further allegations emerged that Trump had used the N-word in the recordings. Then, following the New York property tycoon’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton, the actor and comedian Tom Arnold claimed to have the video of Trump using racist language.

“I have the outtakes to The Apprentice where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever,” Arnold told the Seattle-based radio station KIRO. “It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children.”

But Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which owns the rights to the reality TV show, and its British creator, Mark Burnett, have resisted pressure to release the footage because of “various contractual and legal requirements”.

Once close to Trump, Manigault Newman was among his most high-profile supporters during the election campaign and drew a top salary of $179,700 as director of communications for the White House office of public liaison. She held her April 2017 wedding at Trump’s luxury hotel, close to the White House.

Hers is the second memoir from a former Trump administration member, following that of the ex-press secretary Sean Spicer, but it was always expected to be less adulatory. This week the Daily Beast reported that she had secretly recorded conversations with the president and “leveraged” this while seeking a book deal. On Sunday she is due to appear on NBC’s flagship political show Meet the Press.

Some commentators have struck a note of scepticism about her book. Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent at CNN, wrote in an email newsletter: “Is former ‘Apprentice’ star Omarosa Manigault-Newman a reliable source of info about the Trump White House? Buckle up for debates about that in the coming week. Because she’s about to betray Trump in a new tell-all book.”

For its part, the White House has previously dismissed criticisms from her. In February the deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, said: “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice and this was the fourth time we let her go. She had limited contact with the president while here. She has no contact now.”

In the book, she recalls how in late 2016 Trump’s team held a conference call and scrambled for how to respond to the tape but it never came out. Then a source from The Apprentice contacted her and claimed to be in possession of it. Trump was in office and Manigault Newman continued to investigate.

She continues: “By that point, three sources in three separate conversations had described the contents of this tape. They all told me that President Trump hadn’t just dropped a single N-word bomb. He’d said it multiple times throughout the show’s taping during off-camera outtakes, particularly during the first season of The Apprentice.”

Recalling that she appeared on the first season, Manigault Newman reflects: “I would look like the biggest imbecile alive for supporting a man who used that word.” She says she confided in the former White House communications director Hope Hicks, who said, “I need to hear it for myself,” and continued to ask her frequently about what progress she was making.

She believes that Hicks told the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, that Omarosa was close to getting her hands on the tape, and this gave him cause to terminate her job, though he found a different pretext.

Four months after her departure, she spoke by phone to one of her Apprentice sources. “I was told exactly what Donald Trump said – yes, the N-word and others in a classic Trump-goes-nuclear rant – and when he’s said them. During production he was miked, and there is definitely an audio track.”

Manigault Newman also recalls her interactions with Trump during the filming of The Celebrity Apprentice in late 2007 – a time when the little known Democrat Barack Obama was in the ascendent. “During boardroom outtakes, Donald talked about Obama often. He hated him. He never explained why, but now I believe it was because Obama was black.”